Australian gov attempting to get Google & FB to pay for news

[Postmortis]

Well this is something different.

The Federal Government has ordered the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct to govern commercial dealings between tech giants and news media companies.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said a mandatory code would help "level the playing field" by requiring digital platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news media businesses for the content they produce.

"It's only fair that those that generate content get paid for it," Mr Frydenberg said.

The mandatory code will cover issues including the sharing of data, ranking of news content online and the sharing of revenue generated from news.

So if I understand this correctly, the government wants Google and Facebook to pay up for listing news articles in search results/being shared on FB. Yet those platforms are being used to drive traffic to news articles (you won't see them using 'noindex' anytime soon), so am I missing something here or is this deadset retarded?

 

[city17]

It's because increasingly, news articles are shown to people through Google News or Google Discover, which are closed systems where the user stays within the Google ecosystem. They read articles by major news outlets, but they never get to the news outlet's site. So Google is benefiting from other people's content, but not actually sending traffic to those sites.

If this were about regular organic search, of course it wouldn't make sense, because that's more of a two-way street. If you weren't Google, but tried to build a system where you could read all kinds of news articles for free within your app, you would be sued into oblivion.

 

[Postmortis]

It's because increasingly, news articles are shown to people through Google News or Google Discover, which are closed systems where the user stays within the Google ecosystem. They read articles by major news outlets, but they never get to the news outlet's site. So Google is benefiting from other people's content, but not actually sending traffic to those sites.

When I use Google News , it does always seem to click-through to the publisher website though? I haven't used Google Discover before but if that's the case then yeah fair enough.

 

[city17]

@Postmortis Ah, you're correct for Google News. But for the Discover thing on mobile, my point stands.

 

[GNews]

Thought I posted this earlier.

Yeah......... Google News has a lot going on. Including some billion dollar investment deals to further their dominance on media.

It's fun for me now but if a competitor doesn't really skyrocket into the ball game.... the data mining of Google will be unGodly

 

[BCN]

That's fair. As they are showing more and more content, which costs money to produce.

I'm sure newspapers were happy with the traffic when they showed just headlines - it's a nice middle ground. Google could prove themselves relevant, and newspapers could monetize their content.

It's sort of like movie trailers. Show a 3 minutes trailer of a new movie, and both Youtube and the movie rights owner are happy. Youtube gets their ad impressions, and movie theaters make their sales which will pay off for the rightful owner of the content.

Make that trailer the full length of the movie, and suddenly the copyrights owner is (rightfully) pissed off.

If they want to show the full content or otherwise make content that is summarized, by text and image content owned by someone else, they should pay a fair price.

If they aren't willing to pay, nothing is stopping them from employing an editorial staff and creating their own content - but that costs money. Another option is to do the "Spotify model", where you could pay newspapers per impression of their unique content - but in the end it's up to the newspapers to accept this or not.

Would you be happy if someone copied your lead-gen site, and sent the leads to their own lead distribution system? It's no different, except Google are big enough (owning the majority of users via Chrome, Android, and Google DNS), that they think they can set the narrative and decide for themselves what's right.